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Today's Stories

November 28, 2003

Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?

November 27, 2003

Mitchel Cohen
Why I Hate Thanksgiving

Jack Wilson
An Account of One Soldier's War

Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas

Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD

Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer

Neve Gordon
Gays Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa


November 26, 2003

Paul de Rooij
Amnesty International: the Case of a Rape Foretold

Bruce Jackson
Media and War: Bringing It All Back Home

Stew Albert
Perle's Confession: That's Entertainment

Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities

David Orr
Miami Heat

Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists on the Beach

Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami

Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates

Kathy Kelly
Hogtied and Abused at Ft. Benning

Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement


November 25, 2003

Linda S. Heard
We, the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy

Diane Christian
Hocus Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators

Mark Engler
Miami's Trade Troubles

David Lindorff
Ashcroft's Cointelpro

Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas


November 24, 2003

Jeremy Scahill
The Miami Model

Elaine Cassel
Gulag Americana: You Can't Come Home Again

Ron Jacobs
Iraq Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?

Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant

 

November 14 / 23, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime: Was It Really a Golden Age?

Saul Landau
Words of War

Noam Chomsky
Invasion as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy

Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl

John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills

Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith

Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees

Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins

M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory

Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete

Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil

Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?

William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics

Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine

Dave Lindorff
Bush's Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First

Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners

Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly

Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review of Bush in Babylon

Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq

Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions

Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?

David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead

Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film

Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors

Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam

 

 

November 13, 2003

Jack McCarthy
Veterans for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade

Adam Keller
Report on the Ben Artzi Verdict

Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time

Vijay Prashad
Confronting the Evangelical Imperialists

November 12, 2003

Elaine Cassel
The Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?

Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo

Jonathan Cook
Facility 1391: Israel's Guantanamo

Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home

Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike

John Chuckman
Forty Years of Lies

Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency

Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left

Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops


November 11, 2003

David Lindorff
Bush's War on Veterans

Stan Goff
Honoring Real Vets; Remembering Real War

Earnest McBride
"His Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?

Derek Seidman
Imperialism Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff

David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide

Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War

Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns

Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top

John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day

Website of the Day
Left Hook

 

November 10, 2003

Robert Fisk
Looney Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East

Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar Laws Across Globe

James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss

Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy

Stew Albert
Call Him Al

Gary Leupp
"They Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals


November 8/9, 2003

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism as Racist Ideology

Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered

Saul Landau
The Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz

Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police

William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?

David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War

Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens

Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring Hollow

Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"

Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?

Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum Disorder

Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy

Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post

Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet

Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman

Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder


November 7, 2003

Nelson Valdes
Latin America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance

David Vest
Surely It Can't Get Any Worse?

Chris Floyd
An Inspector Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment

William S. Lind
Indicators: Where This War is Headed

Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"

Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized

Uri Avnery
Israeli Roulette


November 6, 2003

Ron Jacobs
With a Peace Like This...

Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's New Model Army

Maher Arar
This is What They Did to Me

Elaine Cassel
A Bad Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar

Neve Gordon
Captives Behind Sharon's Wall

Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime

 


November 5, 2003

Jeffrey St. Clair
Just a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal

Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?

Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List

Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions

Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance

Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections

Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"

Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid to Ask

 


November 4, 2003

Robert Fisk
Smearing Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?

Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam

Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating the New Unity Partnership

Karyn Strickler
When Opponents of Abortion Dream

Norman Solomon
The Steady Theft of Our Time

Tariq Ali
Resistance and Independence in Iraq


November 3, 2003

Patrick Cockburn
The Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah

Dave Lindorff
Philly's Buggy Election

Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003

Bernie Dwyer
An Interview with Chomsky on Cuba

November 1 / 2, 2003

Saul Landau
Cui Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off

Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality

Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver

Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"

John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines

William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit

Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes

Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred

Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos

Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle

Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action

Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon

Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire

David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him Famous

Adam Engel
America, What It Is

Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn

Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie

Congratulations to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!


October 31, 2003

Lee Ballinger
Making a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy" Combs

Wayne Madsen
The GOP's Racist Trifecta

Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber

Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"

Elaine Cassel
Coming to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)

Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry

 


October 30, 2003

Forrest Hylton
Popular Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia

Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military Families

Dave Lindorff
Big Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"

Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of Israel

Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak

Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?

Alexander Cockburn
Paul Krugman: Part of the Problem

 

 

October 29, 2003

Chris Floyd
Thieves Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton

Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans

Rick Giombetti
Let Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy

The Intelligence Squad
Dark Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks

Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists

Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement

Gary Leupp
Every Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures

October 28, 2003

Rich Gibson
The Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003

Uri Avnery
Incident in Gaza

Diane Christian
Wishing Death

Robert Fisk
Eyewitness in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"

Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte

Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran

Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten

Chris White
9/11 in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective

 


October 27, 2003

William A. Cook
Ministers of War: Criminals of the Cloth

David Lindorff
The Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer

Elaine Cassel
Antonin Scalia's Contemptus Mundi

Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia

John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls

Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us

Bill Kauffman
George Bush, the Anti-Family President

 

 

October 25 / 26, 2003

Robert Pollin
The US Economy: Another Path is Possible

Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China

James Bunn
Plotting Pre-emptive Strikes

Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?

Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany

Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace

Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit

Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror

Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors

Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq

John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula

Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies

Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur

An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia

Karyn Strickler
Down with Big Brother's Spying Eyes

Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization

John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America

Mickey Z.
War of the Words

Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous

Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert

Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand

 

 

 

October 24, 2003

Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's War on Greenpeace

Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews

Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets, Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited

Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty

David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button

Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East

Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't

 

 

 

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November 28, 2003

Who is the Man Behind That Curtain?

Turkey Potemkin

By DAVID VEST

President Bush snuck in and out of Iraq under cover of night on Thanksgiving to have his picture taken with a turkey and some soldiers. If anything else was accomplished by the quick round-trip, the White House did not divulge it.

Cable television news, in case you missed it, went completely gaga. Interviewees gushed about the president's "sacrifice." Even his Democratic would-be opponents saluted the "daring move" and the "great politics" of it all.

Yet, as my friend Jeffrey St. Clair observed after carving an exemplary turkey of his own, if the president really wanted to make a daring move he could have gone to stand in the main square in Tikrit at high noon and told the Iraqis to "Bring it on!"

Air Force One traveled in complete darkness, with no lights visible onboard or off. By coincidence, tonight while driving home from dinner I passed one or two SUVs also running without lights. I blinked my headlamps to call the error to their attention, for safety's sake, but neither driver responded. Perhaps they too were on secret missions.

One can only reflect that before Bush invaded Baghdad he had never seen it, and that now, having both invaded it and visited it, he still has not seen it. He was there to be seen, not to see, to read a stiff, carefully scripted speech and say nothing spontaneous till he got off the podium and into the chit-chat. As far as we know, he met with no Iraqis beyond a few members of his U.S.-picked "governing council." Air Force One had wheels up before either harm or new information could penetrate his security.

If Saddam Hussein has met with any supporters in Iraq lately, it was surely under much the same scenario: arriving under cover of night, emerging from behind a curtain, etc etc.

The same soldiers who were allowed to tell the hand-picked media how much they appreciated the president's gesture have been forbidden for months now to tell reporters how they really feel about being in Iraq. It is perfectly all right for them to praise the commander-in-chief but not to criticize him.

Did anyone in the White House media pool ask the assembled soldiers how they felt about Richard Perle's recent admission that the president's invasion of Iraq was illegal? Probably not, but you would like to think that at least one of them did SOME reporting on the long trip, as opposed to merely eating cranberry sauce and providing "coverage."

His descent into Baghdad, like a thief in the night, served to remind the world that, war zones aside, George W. Bush cannot travel openly anywhere, so deeply are the man and his policies loathed. He dared to enter the Baghdad Airport in secrecy, unannounced, but he dared not address the House of Commons on his recent trip to Great Britain for fear of being hooted out of England. Rare indeed are his truly public appearances, other than before a hand-picked audience of guaranteed reliable supporters, anywhere in the United States, or anywhere on earth, really.

It is far more than a question of security. In these days of snipers and suicide bombers no one expects him to "work the rope." But the president's security arrangements serve quite as much to shield him from hostile opinion as from hostile fire. By his own admission, he does not even read the news.

Were he to appear at any large public event, at any imaginable location, he would risk confronting not only a sea of opposition but an opportunity to appreciate what the late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu (the Great Conducator) may have felt at his final outdoor appearance in Bucharest.

Bush has now landed on an aircraft carrier in a jump suit and flown all the way to Iraq to stage photo-ops. This is Evel Knievel politics, a dangerous game of "top this!" Extrapolating the trend, to what "bold and daring" lengths can he be expected to go, should next year's election odds get really tight? Shoot himself across the Potomac out of a cannon? Parachute into Kabul? Perhaps he might wish to join Tony Blair in a glass box suspended over the Thames, in the style of magician David Blaine.

David Vest writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his band, The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way Down Here.

He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com

Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com

 

Weekend Edition Features for Nov. 14 / 23, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime: Was It Really a Golden Age?

Saul Landau
Words of War

Noam Chomsky
Invasion as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy

Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl

John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills

Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith

Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees

Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins

M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory

Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete

Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil

Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?

William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics

Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine

Dave Lindorff
Bush's Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First

Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners

Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly

Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review of Bush in Babylon

Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq

Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions

Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?

David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead

Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film

Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors

Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam

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